Deep and flat plates jumbled together, a pan wedged at an angle that blocks half the compartment: perhaps putting the dishwasher is the last discipline in which men are superior to women.

Otherwise, the comfortable supremacy is gone, in the family, at work, at the grill or in the stadium, where women even cheer a tad louder when victorious Italians drop their pants.

This irritates some (young) men so much that they seek consolation from preachers, nationalists or mercy psychologists like Jordan Peterson, who all want to maintain the old (now called “toxic”) clarity. Of course, the ideology of masculinity also turns out to be fragile in retrospect. For example, early history discovered that some graves filled with jewelry belonged to men, but some with weapons added to women. Hunting was probably not a male privilege in prehistoric times either.

The fact that men nevertheless ruled women for the longest time with violence cannot be denied, but perhaps to a certain extent explained by male fear.

At least that is what Klaus Theweleit tried in his “Male Fantasies”, in which he attributes fascism to the panic of the dissolution of the body: the man as a “fragmentary body” who cannot stand freedom of hierarchy.

Seen in this way, the present, with its gender categories that have become permeable, would also be a liberation for the man who is finally allowed to be everything because he no longer has to be "he" in the erect sense, but can live any sexual orientation and show feelings.

Is your own father a role model?

That this enormous change in male self-image, which has taken place in two or three generations, is reflected far less than on female-emancipatory self-discoveries, this statement by the young filmmakers Felicitas Sonvilla and Nina Wesemann, is certainly true. And so it is to be welcomed if your documentary series aims to “shed light on the current discourse, the uncertainties, replacement processes and approaches of men today”. To approach this in such a naive, theory-free way is of course brave. At first it seems quite charming to bring thirty specimens of the type to be researched into a one-on-one interview situation, which is more reminiscent of talk therapy than an interrogation, and now simply smilingly to ask everything that comes to mind:What do young men think of love and being a father? What does sex mean to you? What is your relationship to your body? Is your own father your role model? Have you ever been assaulted?

The answers are as diverse as the interviewees chosen. One feels “constantly male”, while others question the associated concept as gay or as trans men. One tells of his soccer fan club, in which women are undesirable (distraction), others admit that their porn consumption has blinded them catastrophically. Two interviewees are annoyed by the accusatory cis-man talk, others see themselves as highly privileged and support feminism. Deep and flat wildly mixed up. Opinions about online dating are divided, but everyone is doing it. Fathers are or most would like to be there. Nobody seems unsympathetic and everyone, it seems, speaks honestly. But what is the result of the long sequence of private, rather trivial answers?

The knowledge value is limited because it is not a representative selection. The participants all belong to the type of new man, including the few who appear a little more muscular. Most of the interviewees can even be counted as part of the emancipatory avant-garde, including the two celebrities (probably only added for marketing reasons), the emo rapper Kelvyn Colt, who sometimes speaks like a queer feminist, and the astonishingly little contributing Kevin Kühnert. You can't approach uncertainty like that. It would have been less pleasant, but much more informative, to also hear aggressive anti-feminists, uneducated machos or a fundamentalist Muslim or Catholic answer instead of documenting a variety that only reflects the variety of the choices.

But what bothers the most is the aesthetic lack of imagination of the series. The stage situation, a tired curtain, remains unchanged. The conversations are interrupted by scenes in which the interviewees dance their insides, so to speak. The radical creativity of a Yoko Ono performance was not to be expected, but it smells a lot like a film school seminar. This artistic minimalism may deliberately direct the focus to the content of the self-reports that have been cut together, but now it becomes doubly clear that these are not able to meet the expectations aroused - generation portrait, summary of the masculinity discourse, analysis of new gender competition.

Nevertheless, one likes to listen to the speakers, often with the slightly embarrassed fascination with which one used to play “truth or dare”.

The series from the ZDF format laboratory Quantum, conceived as a further EM supplementary program (with pants down), is not even looking for the big screen, but is optimized as a snack format for social media use.

It works in that regard.

However, this superficial chat does not advertise that this should be the future of public service productions (online first strategy).

All seven episodes of

Boys

, available in the media library, will be shown on ZDF on Monday at 11.30 p.m.